Just Start: Creative solutions to the Monkey / Pedestal problem

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: You want to get a monkey to recite Shakespeare while sitting on a pedestal. So, what do you do first: train the monkey or build the pedestal?

This thought experiment comes from Astro Teller, the head of Google’s X division: a ‘Moonshot Factory’ tasked with creating radical new technologies to solve some of the world’s hardest problems. And in theory, it’s pretty simple.

“The right answer, of course, is to spend zero time thinking about the pedestal,” says Teller. “But I bet at least a couple of people will rush off and start building a really great pedestal first. Why? Because at some point the boss is going to pop by and ask for a status update — and you want to be able to show off something other than a long list of reasons why teaching a monkey to talk is really, really hard.”

The problem here, of course, is that if you can’t get the monkey to talk, there’s no point in building the pedestal at all. But the temptation is to show “progress” by working on the low-hanging fruit first. It looks like work, if anyone’s watching: it can even feel like work, if we’re only answering to ourselves. But if you can’t solve the monkey problem, you’re wasting your time. Teller gives the example of a team developing a way to turn seawater into carbon-neutral liquid fuel. “Building the core technology to generate the fuel was a relatively straightforward task,” he writes. “Their hardest and most urgent challenge was determining whether they could make their fuel cost competitive.” They decided that they wouldn’t be able to do that within five years, and so they shut the project down to invest the time and money into other things.

It’s an easy decision to make, if you’re talking about monkeys: slightly tougher when it comes to turning seawater into fuel. But what about creative projects?

In the past, I’ve definitely been guilty of prioritising the pedestal. On YouTube, for instance, it’s pretty reasonable to say that if you don’t have an idea that you can package up into a clickable thumbnail and title, you don’t really have an idea: since those things are the main determinant of who watches it, there’s basically almost no point making a video without them (unless you just like making videos, which is fair enough). But for about my first 50-something videos, I came up with the idea first, the title and content second or third, and the thumbnail last: spending all my energy crafting a carefully thought-out video that almost nobody would see. More recently, I’ve been sketching out the thumbnail first, and reframing my ideas if there isn’t a way to make them work: I still want to make the most informative stuff I can, but I also want as many people as possible to see it.

It’s pretty easy to see how this applies to a lot of areas: if you’re writing an article, but you don’t have a headline that will make people click on it, maybe you’re wasting your time. If you write a brilliant book, but it’s not one that people are going to be interested in (or, crucially, one that you can find a way to make them be interested in), then you’re putting in a lot of pedestal-building without a monkey. The problem, in a lot of creative areas, is that the most important thing is also the thing that feels the least like productive work: crank out 500 or 1,000 words a day and you feel like you’ve worked hard and done something useful. Brainstorm a bunch of titles but then decide that none of them quite hit the mark, and you’ve got basically nothing to show for it. Realise that you can’t find a way to interest people in your video idea, and (even though you’ve probably saved yourself a lot of heartache and effort in the long run), it feels like a bad day.

The good news, I think, is that lots of worthwhile things are actually a lot easier than training a monkey to speak English (or recite Shakespeare): you just have to remember what the actual monkey problem is.

Have a great weekend!
Joel x

Stuff I’ve done

🎥 Video - How to read “difficult” books

I’ve been making an effort to read some more challenging books this year (as well as reading about places and time periods I know very little about), and I’ve accumulated a whole bunch of tricks for doing it along the way. Here are the best ones.

Stuff I like

📖 Book - The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

This is another one from my finally-got-around-to-reading-it pile, and it’s astonishingly ahead of its time: the language and asides feel like precursors to PG Wodehouse or Kyril Bonfiglioli, even though the author was a contemporary of Dickens. Fourth-wall breaking locked-room mystery genius, and probably the most readable 19th century novel I’ve read since Great Expectations.

🎶 Hype Music - Fight Night Round 4 - The Soundtrack

My wife and I both loved the soundtrack to this game when it came out in 2009, and I’ve just rediscovered it on YouTube music. Still great for going to the gym (best track:

🎥 Film - Harold And The Purple Crayon

I watched this with my seven-year-old, and it is surprisingly delightful: Zachary Levy plays a great wide-eyed innocent, Jemaine Clement’s entertainingly evil, and the whole film hangs together beautifully. Probably only worth it if you have a kid, though.

🧐 Quote of the week

“Here follows the substance of what I said, written out entirely for your benefit. Pay attention to it, or you will be all abroad, when we get deeper into the story. Clear your mind of the children, or the dinner, or the new bonnet, or what not. Try if you can’t forget politics, horses, prices in the City, and grievances at the club. I hope you won’t take this freedom on my part amiss; it’s only a way I have of appealing to the gentle reader. Lord! haven’t I seen you with the greatest authors in your hands, and don’t I know how ready your attention is to wander when it’s a book that asks for it, instead of a person?”
From The Moonstone

Like this newsletter?

Please forward it to someone else! Also, if you’ve got a book or an article you think I should read, or something you think I should watch or try, please send it my way.

And if you haven’t already, please check out my YouTube channel, where I deep-dive into stuff like productivity, lifelong learning, piano and Brazilian jiu-jitsu.